Crazy Stupid Love
So I saw Crazy Stupid Love with The Girl (look, I can do code names too!) (and, yes, all of you who are amazed–there is now a The Girl. She is made of awesome and laughter and I don’t deserve her–but don’t tell her that!). It’s a good movie, but calling it a romantic comedy may be a bit much. I laughed–quite a bit–but I also cringed. Because while they got a lot right, they also got a lot wrong.
The short-short version: nice guy’s wife gets bored, has affair, wants divorce. (I know, right? But come, if I can take it you can.) Nice guy move into shitbox apartment (The heavens are aligning here, aren’t they?) and tries to move on/survive/not kill self while wife discovers single life 1.) has consequences and 2.) involves shitty dating and 3.) oh look I still love my husband, I just don’t want his dick. (At this point, dear readers, Jason’s mind just shut down and he giggled a lot. A man can only take so much.)
Enter Ryan Gosling (obligatory shout to The Girl–yes, honey. I know you’re doing the it-can’t-be-real sigh when I say his name. It’s okay. I know all his moves). He is the obligatory player in the movie–the young, fit, rich, mumbling rake all single men (and especially freshly-emasculated divorced men) will trade a testicle-to-be-named later to become. After one too many evenings of listening to Steve Carrell’s nice guy (he put in an awesome performance, btw–so good I wanted to research and find out who the cunt who cuckolded him was, because he played it right) The Rake takes The Loser under his wing.
Begin obligatory “be better than the Gap” montage of sexy sexy clothes (OMG the clothes) and the shoes (seriously, I’m straight–ask The Girl) and the haircuts (meh) and the casual sex. Which begins with best-reason-to-get-older-ever Marisa Tomei. Ohmigod.
What follows is the obvious; the schlub wins back his wife, the whore wife realizes she’s a whore and doesn’t like it, and the rake meets the girl of his dreams. You’ve seen this movie.
The issue with the whole thing is tone; if we dissect it into three acts, Act I is “love is dead and stupid.” Act II is “love will give you the creeping death” and Act III is “Love is roses and ponies and little star-shaped candies on your pillow.” All of those are fine ideas, on their own. But they don’t mix well. There was something about the way the movie ended that didn’t sit right with me. I can’t put my finger on it, exactly, and that bothers me a little–I’m sure I”ll figure it out eventually.
But not today.
To Super 8 or Not Super 8
So here’s the deal: I think I’m going to see Super 8 tonight, because I need a break from copyediting and it’s getting fairly decent reviews.
The pros:
- It’s JJ Abrams.
- I’m one of those freaks who enjoys all the lens flares, because it adds to the spectacle and I like my cinema to be pretty. No, I don’t think it washes things out too much–I think it adds a level of realism or grittiness that 3D tries to add, but fails to because of the gimmick.
- It’s getting good reviews, it’s a monster movie, and at least one of the trailers is full of guns, monsters and explosions. I am male; therefore, I am drawn to that.
The cons:
- It’s produced by Spielberg. That’s not a bad thing, unless children are involved. Children and aliens? Together? I’m getting a really really bad “oh, look an updated ET where the adults don’t understand the aliens and only the innocent hope of children can save us” vibe.
- Bugger that shit for a lark.
- It’s starring kids. Which means it’s going to have a “ooh, dangerous but not really because it’d be an R-rated movie if they killed the kids, so I won’t really fear for them” feel. Also, I’m going to have to by the usual tropes of “oh, my parents don’t understand how cool/much smarter/more world-aware I am than they are.” There will be those wry “Look, Short-Round is a real person” moments that ruined Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
- I will watch it thinking “oh that’s from Goonies and that’s from ET and there’s the little kid from Schindler’s List all grown up with a testosterone problem” or something…
Obviously, there are more cons. And more profanity in the cons, but that’s just editing, not content. I expect this will be a solid, well-made, technically beautiful movie with probably better-than-average acting and those Profound Moments ™ of slow-motion and hero music. Which in many movies works for me…
But I have this nagging suspicion I’m not going to like Super 8.
Nuts.
I hate it when I have that suspicion. There are times when being a cinema-freak is a disadvantage.
The Lotus Eaters
I have to give Baen mad props for selling electronic advanced reader copies of many of their books–announcing their schedule out six-eight months usually means that I’m jonesing really hard for a book before its available, and I’ll buy the damn Word document and print it out so I don’t have to wait months.
Did I mention poor impulse control?
Anyway… I just finished Tom Kratman’s THE LOTUS EATERS, the latest novel in his Legion del Cid series. I’d first noticed Tom Kratman when he co-authored a Posleen war book with John Ringo, and bought the e-version of the first Legion del Cid book because 1.) the sample chapters made it seem very violent and vengeful, which appeals to me, and 2.) it was only six bucks. So I wasn’t out gas to Barnes and Noble if I decided I didn’t like it. I liked it well enough to keep reading the rest of the books, and spring $15 for The Lotus Eaters in advance copy, so it can’t be all bad, can it?
It’s not all that good, either. Jason’s rating: Leave your Brain at the Door.
The story in a nutshell is, mankind has discovered an accessible Earthlike world via a rift in space. This world was seeded with life from Earth’s dinosaur period. The UN (evil bastards that they are) eventually emerged as the dominant polity of Earth and shipped its undesirables to Terra Nova, where they promptly replayed the 1800-2000 period of Earth’s history, including a Great Global War that appears to be WW1 and WW2 combined. Did I mention the geography of this Terra Nova matches Earth very closely? I think Kratman took an eraser to a globe, turned it upside down, and renamed all the countries. The United States of America has become the Federated States of Columbia; France has become Gaul; Germany Sachsen; Russia Volga; Japan Yamato–you get the picture. Not especially original world-building.
Our friend Tom (who, in real life was a soldier in Panama) sets our story in the Terra Novan state of Balboa–which, coincidentally, sits astride a Transitway between Terran Nova’s two largest oceans. Hmm… anyway, the point to this is that Kratman is extrapolating his political views on the future, and then using TN to refight the first decade of the 20th Century. I suppose one could say he’s going for the allegorical–and perhaps, because like Ringo (or maybe because of Ringo’s influence) Kratman tries for the semi-literay allusion now and then. In between the oral sex and the crucifictions, I mean.
In the first two books, our protagonist (one Patrick Hennessey cum Patricio Carrerra) has his family killed, inherits a fortune, and convinces the Balboan government to finance the formation of a mercenary “Legion” so he can go declare war on the Salafi Ikwhan (read: Al Queda), which he does and eventually wins. The Lotus Eaters is a particularly boring book about the road to war between Balboa and the Tauran (European) Union. The writer in me kept turning the page, hoping against hope something goddamn exciting would happen. But it never does. It’s 500 pages of “here’s another neat trick for when we finally go to war.” Along the way Carrerra’s legion fights off Santandern (read: Somali) pirates, coup attempts, and the odd assassination attempt. In all cases the tonic for the ill is sheer, unmitigated and unrestricted brutality and horror against the perpertrators until the cause is won.
Which, truth be told, is what keeps me interested. Because we all had that moment, after 9/11 or Mogadishu or whenever something bad happened and our mind said “Oh, you sorry fuckers are going to PAY.” In Kratman’s books, they DO pay. Horribly and completely, by being conquered and slaughtered. Fail a coup attempt, kill a close friend, attempt rape on the man’s wife? You get crucified with every one of your cronies on the beach. Or beaten to death. Or tortured to death. The essential thesis of Kratman’s books are this: the world is an evil place, and rather than keeping to our safe and lofty ideals, perhaps the cure is to be even more evil in return, so that even the evildoers will tremble in fear.
You can imagine my satisfied glee at those parts. Because there’s nothing more in the world I like more than seeing people who do evil things get impaled in the hot sun surrounded by fire ants. I’m one of those Philistines who thinks maybe, just maybe, deep, personal terror is more useful a deterrent than rehabilitation. I’d prefer a society of people who say “Do evil things? Fine–we’ll send this motherfucker to your house, where he’ll set it on fire with you in it.”
Is it sustainable in the real world? Of course not. But that doesn’t make it still a viscerally satisfying flight of fancy. Which, I think, is Kratman’s goal.
Neverwhere
So I’ve just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE on the advice of my Seton Hill mentor. Look, there it is on the right!
This is not, in fact, the cover I had on the paperback edition, but it is much nicer.
My rating: Underwhelming.
I’ve enjoyed what Neil Gaiman I’ve read, for the most part. I can very easily appreciate his craft as a storyteller–particularly his sentence construction and attention to detail in his description and pacing. His sentences are often prosaic and fun to read, and flow with a poetry that only the British seem to be able to bring to the language, which I guess is only fair: they did invent it, after all.
My only real complaint with the novel is that it is, in fact, too British. It’s quite good, but you can’t eat popcorn to it. (See the Eddie Izzard clip below, about 1 minute in to see what I mean)
Gaiman spends so much time establishing Richard Mayhew as a nobody (so that he can become somebody by the end) that I kept turning the page thinking “Dear zombie jesus and gods above and below, please let something happen!” and was, for the most part, disappointed. I am admittedly an American pigdog, so I can’t be expected to maintain a traditional “oh this is a nice stroll through this intricate and wholly unnecessary world” mindset. London Below is richly appointed and described, but I remain unconvinced that it all needed to be there to move the plot along.
It had moments of power, quite a few. As I say, I can appreciate the craft. The hatchetmen, Croup and Vandemar, are downright hilarious. Flat and unchanging, yes–undone by their own nature, yes–but entertaining. It’s often quite fun to play outright evil and I suspect Gaiman giggled a bit whilst he was writing parts of their scenes. I would complain that by the end of the book the gimmick was getting a bit old and, however much I might have liked them, they were becoming in my mind caricatures of the pair of henchmen rats in “Flushed Away.” Not that I don’t still want a “Croup and Vandemar” t-shirt. “We burned the City of Troy–we don’t do safe.”
As I read this book I was continually thinking of the urban fantasy I intend to write in the next couple months, looking at its components and weighing them against NEVERWHERE to see how I may measure against the great man. I can safely say that whatever I finalize, my novel will not involve such a well-tapestried underworld. NEVERWHERE may be a true urban fantasy in the most sincere sense, since it does posit a fantastic community lurking in the sewers and Tube stations of a mundane London. As slow as it was I could clearly see and hear much of Gaiman’s London Below, and even if I did have nagging doubts about the character interactions (several where little more than archetypes, but then often all you need is archetypes) I did feal as though I were there–even when I didn’t really care or want to be.
My previous Gaiman experience consists of shaking his hand a decade or so ago at ICFA when it was still held in Ft. Lauderdale, and the only book of his I have strong memories of is AMERICAN GODS. I know that I enjoyed the book, and that I was less than no one at the conference in 2000 or 2001–but NEVERWHERE, while credible and even stylish, does not enamor me to read more Gaiman. As a tool for thought of my own novel, however, it did help me to solidify that, urban fantasy or no, I want my characters to be the basis of my novel–not the world itself. Whatever city I pick, it will not have a [--] Below.
8)
It’ll be dark enough in the alleys.
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